John Mueller from Google has done it again with his site, this time uploading an audio file in WAV format for his robots.txt file. You can access it and listen to him reading his robots.txt rules in his own voice. It’s a valid robots.txt file, but I suspect no search engine can understand it.
And they understand it not because of his German-Swiss accent, but because search engines do not understand robots.txt files that are not in text format.
Here is the audio file at johnmu.com/robots.txt:
Download audio
I spotted this here from Michael Carrico on LinkedIn. Michael Carrico wrote: “Has anyone noticed John Mueller’s latest Robots.txt file? It’s an audio file! I love that he’s testing these things on his own site. I assume he’s testing to see if Google can still process the file properly. Very interesting!”
John replied: “It’s also technically a valid robots.txt file that seems to be accepted by most crawlers. I wrote down how to create it but never got around to uploading it.” John told me: “It’s actually a valid text robots.txt file. Someone mentioned that you can use view-source with it and it will show you (or you can use ‘curl’ or some other command line tool, but who does that these days :-)). The robots.txt standard is flexible in that it skips things it doesn’t understand, which is why Gary’s file works too.”
Earlier this year, John’s site was removed from Google search.
Maybe he’s having too much fun?
Forum discussion on LinkedIn.
